After a full day on Beijing on Tuesday, Tony and I awoke on Wednesday (June 12) and caught a little of the Miami Heat game, which played in Beijing at 9:00 AM. We watched the first half and then decided to head out of the hotel and start exploring. We walked a couple blocks to the subway station and took it just 4 stops. When we popped out, we were right at the entrance to the park where one of China’s most iconic symbols is located.
Minutes later, we were walking right up to the Temple of Heaven. It was a neat sight to see, and we explored some of the other surrounding structures in the park.
Funny story: we ran into these Brazilian girls, Camila and Vanessa for the third time in this trip. They were on our river cruise in Guilin, then on our fight to Beijing the next day, and now we run o to them again. We had not exchanged information before, but this time we did. Three times is no coincidence. Sure enough, we never saw them again. But who knows – maybe one day. And now we have some possible new pen pals.
From there we did a little exploring (read: getting lost) around town before getting lunch at Pizza Hut. We then got back in touch with Sam and a couple hours later we met up with him at the Ya Show Market.
Ya Show is one of the more famous markets here – it is probably about five floors of all sorts of vendors, like a big flea market all in one building, mostly catering to tourists. They sell lots of cheap clothing and electronics ripoffs but if you bargain with them you can usually get some good deals. However, if you’re any kind of Westerner, especially American like us, it will take you a while. They think we’ll pay higher prices. But after you walk away from them, they chase you down and give you a substantially lower price. I got myself a couple of belts and Tony got a wallet. We also picked up a few gift items here.
But the main reason we came here was to visit a fabric shop where you can get custom shirts and suits made at a nice bargain. Sam has had a number of these items made for him here and he brought us to visit a tailor here named Sonny. We bargained with him and got him down to 800 RMB for a suit (roughly $130 USD). I also got 3 nice dress shirts for the equivalent of $25 USD each.
What was neat is I got to look at the fabrics on rolls. They then measured me up, took my dimensions, and we placed the order. I told them I needed it finished by Friday since we were leaving Saturday. He did it. I came back in Thursday for a fitting and then picked it all up on Friday – they even put it in a nice garment travel back which was easy to carry on to the plane back home.
Well as we were finishing up there, Sam was actually in the process of closing on his new apartment just a few blocks away in a brand new high rise in the Sanlutin area of Beijing. This is a very trendy, very international area of town. We checked out his pad and it was sweet. We were there as he signed the paperwork with his realtor and we even snapped a photo with Sam in his new place. We were his very first visitors!
After he closed on that, we walked back across the street and had dinner at an Iranian restaurant. We actually thought we were at the Turkish restaurant he was looking for, but after we sat done we discovered it was Iranian. The fact that they did not serve any alcohol should have tipped us off. In any case it was a very delicious meal – a very Mediteranean cuisine.
After dinner we grabbed drinks at a couple of different bars just down the street, including a rooftop bar called the Q Bar. It was a really amazing looking place but it was a dead Wednesday night so we had almost the entire rooftop to ourselves with a nice view of some nearby buildings. We chilled there for a bit and didn’t stay out too late as we had a really GREAT day ahead of us.